She looked at the drawer. There had to be matches in there. He smoked, so there had to be matches, but it was his drawer, and she’d been told not to even open it.
This is stupid, she thought. I just want to light a candle.
She stood there looking at the drawer. She knew there weren’t any matches in the kitchen. There weren’t any in the garage. There wasn’t even a lighter anywhere. It was just a candle. She just wanted to light the candle.
This is stupid, she thought. He opens my drawers all the time.
She reached out her hand to ease open the drawer, careful not to shift any of the contents. He wouldn’t know she’d opened it if nothing was moved. She looked at the neatly arranged tray of his small possessions.
There were several of his favorite mechanical pencils, the kind with the minute points that he preferred for ledger work even though now he used a spreadsheet; there were collar stays and small packets of extra buttons, business cards and restaurant receipts neatly folded. She could see handwriting on the back of one. She picked up a pencil on the counter and gently lifted the paper the way a character in a police show might do it so that she could read the message: “Jazmien 888-123-3456 Call me XXX.” She read it again. Her hand trembled. The paper fell into the drawer.
She used the pencil again nudging items in their plastic squares, exploring the detritus of his life contained within a bathroom drawer. And there it lay. Just under the paper receipts, right next to Jazmien, his wedding ring.
She stared at it lying there as though it were a body, a dead body, as though something had died, but no one had told her yet, and she stumbled on the body lying in the parlor. She closed the drawer with the eraser end of the wooden pencil and stepped away as though she were in a crime scene and didn’t want to contaminate it.
She didn’t really want to light that candle anyway. To hell with the matches.
She decided not to take the candlelit bath after all. She glanced at the clock above the mirror and saw that it was nearly ten o’clock already. Sliding into her flannel nightgown, she walked towards their daughter’s room to make sure that she was asleep, then turned off the last few lights and went to bed.
She lay there thinking. He came home from work eventually. Some nights it was so late he should have slept in his office, but he did come home. There was that once, the night of the company Christmas party, that he took a suit with him and said he’d be spending the night in town since he’d need to be there late to make sure everyone got home safely, but that was because he was the boss. It was his job to make sure no one drove when they’d been drinking. And he’d lost so much weight that his ring probably wouldn’t stay on anymore. It was that juice fast he’d been doing. All those vegetables he’d been grinding up and drinking. He was never hungry at night, he said, because he’d been drinking so much juice during the day and he was getting home long after the family had eaten.
Eventually she had stopped saving a plate of supper for him. He didn’t eat it when he arrived anyway. Who wanted to eat a heavy, home-cooked meal at 10PM? Sometimes it was nearly midnight before he showed up. All he wanted to do was change into running shoes and leave for his midnight run. She remembered that he asked her to come in the beginning, but how could she leave a six year old alone in the house to go walking with him? And if she did walk with him, he left her too far behind for it to be companionable. It was almost as if he wished she hadn’t come along. So she stopped trying. And he stopped asking.